Quotes from Joseph E. LeDoux

Emotions are a critical source of information for learning.

These narrative moves reduce dissonance and help maintain a sense of control and personal unity.

consciousness is a self-narrative

The popular idea of unconscious emotions needs further elaboration. As I stressed throughout this book, emotions can't be unconscious. On the other hand, because nonconscious schema are building blocks of conscious emotional experiences, feelings can seem to reflect nonconscious emotions. And since schema also influence behavior, actions can seem to have been driven by a nonconscious emotion. But emotion schema are not emotions—they are the cognitive launchpads of emotions.

But one group did. By 3.5 billion years ago, bacteria had emerged, and continue to this day as the most populous kind of organism on Earth.

While I was fearing it, it came, but came with less of fear. . . . 'Tis harder knowing it is due, than knowing it is here." —EMILY DICKINSON2

conspecific aggression,

memory is dynamic—it changes by the mere passage of time, or by the accumulation of new experiences.

The utility that allowed emotions to persist in the genes of our species may have been the ability to personalize value. Rather than simply detecting risk and avoiding danger, the organism could consider, "How dangerous is this to me?" Other animals can represent value, but only humans can make it personal. In this view, an emotion is the experience that something of value is happening to you. If so, emotions could not exist without autonoesis. No self, no emotion.

one thing that is often missing from conscious awareness is the reason or motivation for why a particular behavior was produced.